So Norquistian fever is with us again and the drive to put Ronnie Popular's name on everything might now extend to US currency, again. It's really "six to five and pick 'em", but only if we can have Fawn Hall stuffing a report into her skirt on the reverse side. Andrew Jackson's genocidal Trail of Tears is at least as devastating to the US as the decades of supply-side idiots who have screwed the US economy. And the trivial Reagan filmography shines more brightly on the Hill than any of the current crop of 2016 GOP pretenders like Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson....
No, I want Reagan on the $20 because the man there now, Andrew Jackson, is if not the worst president we’ve ever had (he’s at least in the running alongside Andrew Johnson), definitely the worst president who shows up in lists of the best presidents.
There is not a single significant accomplishment of his administration that you can defend today as a positive thing.
Seriously, having his face on the money cements his place as one of “the greats” among most Americans because most Americans seem to know nothing about the man. There is not a single significant accomplishment of his administration that you can defend today as a positive thing. He was celebrated in the 1830s largely because of the ways in which America was horrible in the 1830s...
On domestic matters? Jackson is a patron saint of the conspiracy-theorist goldbugs who blame the Federal Reserve for all our ills. He succeeded where Ron Paul failed, dismantling our nation’s central bank at the time in the name of free markets—specifically the freedom of local “wildcat” banks to issue unstable, ultimately worthless financial instruments in the name of short-term profit.
This bold stance in favor of liberty and private enterprise led to that period of prosperity we now know as the Panic of 1837, an eight-year-long economic disaster in which the wildcat banks all imploded at once, leading to soaring unemployment rates only to be matched by the Great Depression a century later.